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Rendering artifactLumen

Lumen Emissive Instability

Stabilize small bright emissive sources that are culled or undersampled by Lumen.

Lumenemissiveglobal illuminationflickermaterials

What you're seeing

A small bright emissive mesh produces noisy, flickering, or view-dependent indirect light.

Likely causes

  • The emitting surface is too small or too intense for stable sampling.
  • Lumen culls the small mesh from Lumen Scene and only screen traces retain it.
  • The source changes enough luminance to make global illumination unstable.

Check in this order

  1. 01Inspect whether the emitting mesh appears in Lumen Scene.
  2. 02Increase the emitting area or reduce extreme emissive intensity while preserving the intended output.
  3. 03Enable Emissive Light Source on the mesh instance when the small emitter must remain represented.
  4. 04Check TSR Flickering Analysis only after the Lumen source is stable.

Views and commands

Lumen Scene

View Mode > Lumen > Lumen Scene

Shows whether the small emitting mesh is represented by Lumen.

Mesh instance setting

Lighting > Emissive Light Source

Keeps an important small emissive mesh represented in Lumen Scene.

TSR Flickering Analysis

r.TSR.Visualize 7

Shows temporal flicker that remains after the Lumen source is corrected.

Epic documentation

Related guides

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